Good Beginnings

I had been feeling like my poetry well had run dry, but yesterday, I wrote a poem that weaves together Hillary Clinton, the Stanford rape case, and Esther from the Hebrew Bible--I'm preaching this Sunday while my pastor is at Synod Assembly and we're off lectionary--the Esther text was chosen months ago.

It's interesting to think of Esther in this week where we've seen Hillary Clinton clinch the Democratic nomination.  It's interesting to think about Esther in this week where the Stanford rapist got only 6 months of jail time for doing horrid actions to an unconscious woman.  In so many ways 21st century women have more options than Esther, and yet, we still face the same dangers. 

Will I talk about these things in my sermon?  Yes, I will.

But I will also point out that Esther had severe disadvantages.  She was an orphan and an exile and a female--in an ancient, patriarchal culture where these factors meant more than they mean in our industrialized world today.  Yet she was pivotal in saving her people from doom. 

It's interesting to think about gender and power; it's interesting every week, but it's especially interesting this week.

I was motivated to finish the poem because I wanted to submit it to Rattle's Poets Respond feature, which the website describes this way:  "Every Sunday we publish one poem online that has been written about a current event that took place the previous week. This is an effort to show how poets react and interact to the world in real time, and to enter into the broader public discourse."

Even though the poem wasn't chosen, I'm happy that I wrote it--it's one of the first poems that has made me happy in what feels like months and months, but has actually only been a week or two.  And now I'll submit it to the Beloit Poetry Journal, which has inspired me to type some newer poems into the computer.

Visiting old poems as I type them in also makes me happy.  This morning, I typed in a poem about Jesus at a Christmas cookie swap.  I still need a good title.

Last night, we picked up our mandolins and started to learn a different song, now that we've mastered "The Rose."  Now we're working on "I'll Fly Away."  It makes me happy that we're still playing our mandolins.

On a different creativity note:  I have a cake baking in the oven. I had leftover ingredients from last week's cake baking for church (applesauce, dark corn syrup, and some milk going sour)--the cake is fairly low fat and low calorie, and I know that this week-end I will want a treat of some kind--but more important, I wanted to use up those ingredients.

Here's hoping creativity week-end continues!